Tag: writing blogs

  • My author interview on March 19, 2022, courtesy of author Jill Piscitello

    https://jillpiscitello.com/ INTERVIEW: What was the inspiration behind your latest release?  The idea for the story came from a series I wrote in my late twenties. In between caring for my daughter and helping my husband in his business, I wrote several novellas set in a vacation resort on a tropical island. It was superficial, frivolous…

  • An Unexpected Visitor

    Taking a page from an article I read on The Writer blog: Resurrect your darlings: How to recycle deleted material from your manuscript, I decided to ‘resurrect’ some of my deleted material from the original MISTY DREAMS draft and post it here. This is the second in the series. For those who have read the…

  • Fields of Poppies and Other Childhood Memories

    How many times do we come across an image that reminds us of something we experienced in the past? Imagine a vast green field scattered with bright red poppies as far as the eye can see. It may sound unoriginal and travelblog-ish, perhaps, but for me it has great meaning. Poppies represent one of the…

  • A Home For Misty

    This month’s post is a piece I deleted from the first draft of my book Misty Dreams. For those of you who have read my book and have heard my story of how the first draft turned out to be a massive 360,000 words, this is one of the many scenes I regretfully had to…

  • THE DESK

    Dad, I thought of you today, and for some reason my memory whirled back to the first few days we settled in a new country, after mom and I joined you there. We were so happy to be reunited! We hadn’t seen you in ten months, but it had felt like an eternity. You wanted…

  • Things I Wish I Knew Before Writing a Book

    There are so many things I was unaware of when I started writing my romance novel, things that would have saved me a lot of time. But at the time I was writing for my own enjoyment. Not that I didn’t aspire to become a published author; I just didn’t think I had what it…

  • OUR WORDS MATTER

    As a self-published author, I have developed a new appreciation for book reviews. I have always been a voracious reader, but before I became a published author I seldom left a review. The books I usually read were written by established authors, authors whose books amasses hundreds, if not thousands of reviews. What difference would…

  • What type of reader are you?

    I often wonder if other readers are as volatile as me when it comes to reading habits. Are you a multi-task reader, the type who likes to read more than one book at a time or a single task reader, preferring to read one book at a time? Are you adventurous, the type that likes…

  • The Elusive Plot

    Originally posted on Hope, Hearts, & Heroes: Photo from Freeimages.com How many authors or aspiring authors have a pile of unfinished manuscripts stacked in a drawer or on their computers? How many of them were so sure each one of these would be their best work yet, only to lose interest after a few thousand…

  • Christmas in July

    Okay, this title has nothing to do with this article, but I couldn’t resist using it, even though it’s August. Every time I hear this expression I’m reminded of my Christmases in South Africa, where the seasons were topsy-turvy and a ‘white Christmas’ was some ridiculous idealistic illusion we compensated for by ‘dressing’ the branches…